XF 1.5How to handle 13 year old forum/gallery migration?

Active member

I know it has to be done but I've put it off for last year or so. I've slowly switched my smaller websites from vB to XF and now I have a bigger and 13 year old forum and gallery website which needs to move.

So far I've done some manual redirection of the photopost gallery to new one. I got list of most visited landing pages for 2015 and previous years from analytics and made manual redirects in .htaccess file so at least majority of the users are redirected to proper place from old URLs.

I am not sure how to go about handling the same for much older forum and gallery with URLs coming in from all over the place. Is hiring someone to manually build an htaccess file for most of the URLs a good approach? Is it okay for htaccess file to contain thousands of redirects?

Is there any solution out there for photopost redirects? I searched and couldn't find anything... what if you could retain the contant IDs and redirection script matches the ID from photopost to XMG? If ID in the URL/DB matches, URL redirects.